The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [125]
Of the countless GIs who spent a tour of duty in Japan, few failed to load up on souvenirs. But only a handful of Americans realised what a collector’s paradise was within their reach . . . The Hauges got off to a flying start with the whirlwind of inflation that swept the Japanese yen from 15 all the way to 360 to the dollar. At the same time the Hauges were reaping a paper harvest of yen, Japanese families, hit with postwar taxes, were living an ‘onionskin’ existence, peeling off long-treasured art works to stay afloat.
Onionskin, bamboo shoots. They were images of vulnerability, tenderness and tears. They were also images of undressing. It paralleled the stories so avidly told and retold by Philippe Sichel and the de Goncourts in Paris during the first febrile rush of Japonisme of how you could buy anything, how you could buy anyone.
Iggie might be expatriate, but he was still an Ephrussi. He too started to collect. On his trips with Jiro he bought Chinese ceramics – a pair of Tang Dynasty horses with arching backs, celadon-green dishes with swimming fish, fifteenth-century blue-and-white porcelain. He bought Japanese golden screens with crimson peonies, scrolls with misty landscapes, early Buddhist sculpture. You could buy a Ming Dynasty bowl for a carton of Lucky Strikes, Iggie told me, guiltily. He showed it to me. It has a perfect high ring, if you tap it gently. It has peonies painted in blue under a milky glaze. I wonder who had to sell it.
It was during these years of the Occupation that netsuke became ‘collectables’. The Japan Travel Bureau guide on netsuke, published in 1951, records ‘valuable help given by Rear Admiral Beton W. Dekker, former commander of the US Fleet Activities at Yokosuka, Japan and a most devoted connoisseur of Netsuke’. This guide, in print for thirty years, gave its view of netsuke in the clearest way:
The Japanese are by nature clever with their fingers. This deftness may be attributed to their inclination to small things, developed in them because they live in a small insular country, and are not continental in character. Their habit of eating their meals with chopsticks, which they learn to handle cleverly from early childhood, may also be regarded as one of the causes that made them thus deft-handed. Such a special characteristic is responsible at once for the merits and demerits of Japanese art. The people lack an aptitude for producing anything on a large scale or deep and substantial. But they display their nature in finishing their work with delicate skill and scrupulous execution.
The way that Japanese objects were talked of had not changed in the eighty years since Charles bought them in Paris. Netsuke were still to be enjoyed for all those positive attributes given to precocious children, the ability to finish, scrupulousness.
It is a bitter thing to be compared to a child. It was made even more painful when this was publicly expressed by General MacArthur. Sacked by President Truman on the grounds of insubordination over the Korean War, the General left Tokyo for Haneda airport on 16th April 1951: ‘escorted by a cavalcade of military police motorcyclists . . . Lining the route there were American troops, the Japanese police and Japanese people. School children were given time off from classes to line the road; public servants in post offices, hospitals or administrations were given the opportunity to attend also. The Tokyo police estimated that 230,000 persons had witnessed MacArthur’s departure. It was a quiet crowd,’ wrote the New York Times, ‘which gave little outward sign of emotion . . .’ At the Senate hearings on his return, MacArthur compared the Japanese to a twelve-year-old boy in comparison to a forty-five-year-old Anglo-Saxon adult: ‘You can plant basic concepts there. They [are] close enough to origin to be elastic and acceptable to new concepts.’
It felt like public,